Colonial Colleges: The First Five

Did you know: Harvard's first scholarship fund was created in 1643 with a gift from Ann Radcliffe, Lady Mowlson.

It did not take long before the Southern colonies felt the need for their own institutes of higher learning. Virginia had previously implemented the Indian College, aimed primarily at educating Native Americans, but this proved a failure after the Indian uprising of 1622. It wasn't until near the end of the century that a college was founded in Virginia.

The College of William and Mary

Under James Blair, a royal charter was issued in February 1693 to establish "The College of William and Mary," appointing Blair as the first president. Despite its early success, changes in legislatures, fire and uninterested professors kept the college from truly getting under way until 1726. Blair established many aspects of the college under a Scottish model, such as a two-year system for the bachelor's degree and a four-year course of study for the Master's degree. William and Mary was originally envisioned to contain schools of grammar (for boys age 12 to 15), moral philosophy (to study logic, rhetoric and ethics) and natural philosophy (to study physics, metaphysics and mathematics), and divinity (to be completed after the studies in philosophy). After completion of the divinity school, young men were to be ordained into the Church of England. However, at least until the eighteenth century, most young men spent only about a year of study at William and Mary before going on to other professional studies in the other colonies or England. George Wythe became the first law professor in the U.S. in 1779 when he introduced a formal study of law into the college curriculum.

Did you know: The College of William and Mary is the only U.S. institution to have a Royal Charter.

Yale

Yale was founded in 1701 as a collegiate school in Killingworth, Connecticut. In 1716, the school was moved to New Haven and was renamed Yale College in 1718 after a donation by Elihu Yale. Like its predecessors, Yale was mainly concerned with providing a supply of learned ministers. It has been estimated that Yale and Harvard graduated approximately 850 ministers in a 40-year period. The campus was laid out to resemble Oxford University in England, and the mission of the college was the "upholding and propagating of the Christian Protestant religion by a succession of learned and orthodox men'" (Cremin, 321). In later years, several colleges would

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